The Scandals Of An Innocent

by Nicola Cornick

  Alice shivered a little beneath the covers. She had not expected to see Miles again. Although she had heard a rumor that he was back in Yorkshire on some business connected with his work for the government, she had imagined it would be a fleeting visit and that he would soon return to London. Evidently it was the place that suited him best. After he had failed to secure Miss Bell, the nabob’s heiress, in marriage, he had cut a swathe through the bawdy houses of the capital and had set up one of the most famous courtesans in the city as his inamorata. Lizzie Scarlet had told her all about it, and Alice had pretended that she had not cared. But she had cared. She had cared dreadfully. It had hurt her so much to think of Miles’s profligate ways when once she had naively imagined he had some feelings for her. It had been a salutary lesson in the pitfalls of imagining herself in love. She was never going to make that mistake again.

  Alice thumped her pillow into final submission and rolled over onto her side in a vain attempt to sleep. It was a great pity that Miles had recognized her tonight. She wondered what he would do. When she had heard the gossip about his despicable wager, she had written to him to demand that he never approach her again. Her pride had prompted her to tell him what she thought of him and she had confidently expected never to hear from him again. Now, though, she had a suspicion that he might seek her out to ask her what on earth she had been doing robbing a gown shop in the middle of the night. He was, despite his shameful behavior, still an officer of the Crown, with certain responsibilities. And she was, indubitably, a criminal.

  Alice wriggled uncomfortably. She was well aware that she was now in Miles’s power, and the ways in which he might choose to exert that power made her shiver. Yes indeed, robbing the gown shop had been a dangerous mistake and now she knew she was going to have to pay.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “W HERE ON EARTH did you get to?” Dexter Anstruther and Nat Waterhouse looked up curiously as Miles Vickery reentered the salon of the Granby, the most respectable hotel in Fortune’s Folly. Miles and his colleagues had been talking business late into the night and had chosen the Granby over the rather more dubious pleasures of the Morris Clown Inn because, as Nat said, if they had met at the Morris Clown then every criminal in Yorkshire would have known their business within the hour. In contrast, the staff at the Granby were discreet, even if they were glancing ostentatiously at the clock and barely stifling their yawns. The other guests, a couple of half-pay officers and a respectable, gentrified couple, had retired to bed long since. Fortune’s Folly out of the spa season was as inhospitable as the grave. Not even hardened fortune hunters had chosen to spend the winter in the snow-bound Yorkshire dales, though no doubt they would flock back in spring when the weather improved in order to take advantage of Sir Montague Fortune’s Dames’ Tax and find a local heiress to wed.

  By then, Miles thought, he would have stolen a march on all the others and carried off the richest prize in the Fortune’s Folly marriage mart. His recent, unexpected and wholly unwelcome inheritance of the Marquisate of Drum had left him with a monstrous pile of debt-twice his original commitment-and so once again he intended to pay court to Miss Alice Lister, a former housemaid whose eccentric employer had left her the magnificent sum of eighty thousand pounds when she had died the previous year.

  Alice’s inheritance had caused a sensation among Yorkshire society who could not decide whether to cut her dead for her humble birth or embrace her for her money. Miles had not suffered from any such dilemma. A fortune like Alice’s was there for the taking, and since Alice herself was so pretty, taking her into the bargain would be a positive pleasure. He had set out to seduce her with a single-minded intent and had very nearly succeeded. But then he had made a strategic error-he had heard of an even greater prize, a London heiress with one hundred thousand pounds to her name, and he had abandoned Alice’s conquest for the greater reward. He had thought about it for all of five minutes, ruthlessly weighing his lust for Alice and the work he had already done to win her against the prospect of claiming Miss Bell’s one hundred thousand pounds. Miss Bell’s money had won, of course. And he had quenched his lust elsewhere.

  Except that holding Alice in his arms tonight had reminded him of just how much he had wanted her. There was something about her that aroused some very basic instincts in him, instincts other than greed for her money, of course. Tonight she had smelled heavenly, of roses and honey, rather than the heavy, manufactured perfumes preferred by the courtesans he had known. The scent had clung to her hair, which, once he had dispensed with her hat, had glowed a glorious pale silver color in the moonlight. Alice was small in terms of height, but she was rounded rather than slender, and her body had been curved, soft and yielding against the hardness of his. Some people might consider Alice plump-in fact some society matrons, looking for things to disparage about the housemaid-turned-heiress, had criticized Alice’s robust peasant build and commented on how useful such sturdiness must have been when she was turning mattresses and beating carpets. Miles had no criticisms to make at all when it came to Alice’s figure. She might not be conventionally beautiful but she was strikingly pretty with the promise of something sensual within. The fact that her sensuality was deliciously unawakened only made her more of a temptation to him. He had a primitive urge to be the one to waken all that promise.

  He shifted in his chair as he remembered the gentle curves of Alice’s body molding themselves so confidingly to his. He had been instantly aroused, trapped by a sensuality so hot and fierce he had wanted to strip those boy’s clothes off her there and then, and take her against the wall.

  His ribs gave a painful twinge, dampening his ardor most effectively. In order to get away from him, the little minx had pulled a trick that would not have disgraced a pickpocket from the stews of London. He supposed that as a servant, Alice would need to know such ruses to defend her virtue. He would do well to remember that in future before he was felled with a painful knee in the groin.

  “I was merely taking the air,” he said, to looks of patent disbelief from his friends. “Too much claret.”

  “You were so long we thought you had been taking the maidservant at the Morris Crown, never mind the air,” Dexter observed.

  “And what is that?” Nat followed up on Dexter’s comment, pointing at the rather grubby wedding gown in Miles’s hands. “Miles, old fellow, I think the inheritance of another fifty thousand of debt along with the Drum title is turning your mind.”

  “I found it in the street,” Miles said, looking at the dress and deliberately neglecting to add that he had found one of the Fortune’s Folly heiresses attached to it. “It is a wedding gown,” he added. He cast it over the arm of the chair and reached for the brandy bottle. He would reunite Alice with the gown in the morning, and ask her what the devil she had been doing. She had given him the perfect excuse to call-and the perfect weapon to use against her in his negotiations to persuade her into marriage. His previous abandonment of her was a rather large stumbling block to his plans, for he doubted that she would be very susceptible to his suit as a result, and her recent discovery of the wager he had made against her virtue was even more unfortunate. The letter she had sent him had spelled out her feelings most precisely:

  I never had the remotest inclination to fall prey to your somewhat tarnished charm, Lord Vickery, and when I heard about your sordid wager I could only congratulate myself on seeing you from the first as nothing more than a squalid fortune hunter with no saving graces whatsoever.

  Miss Lister, Miles thought, had quite a way with words, far more so than any other servant girl he had ever come across. Not that talking had been what he was interested in when he had dallied with maidservants in the past…

  At least he had leverage now. He would stoop to blackmail if he had to do so. Alice’s fortune would be sufficient to wipe out the majority of his debt and stave off the most pressing of his creditors for a little while. And if it meant that a former housemaid became Marchioness of Drummond, well, her money for his t
itle was a fair bargain.

  “I’m surprised you recognize such a thing as a wedding gown,” Dexter said with a grin. “Marriage isn’t exactly your forte, is it, old fellow?”

  Miles shot him an unfriendly look. Dexter was so hopelessly in love with Miles’s cousin Laura that he never ceased to extol the virtues of wedlock in what Miles considered to be a deeply boring manner. To Miles’s mind it was ridiculous even to consider that Dexter and Laura had something valuable. When he wed he fully intended to spend as little time as possible with his wife. That was his idea of a happy marriage. Love for a woman was a weakness in his opinion, the most pointless emotion that existed. It made a man too vulnerable. He had no use for or interest in love at all and had cut it out of his life when he had quarreled with his father and walked away from his family at the age of eighteen to join the army. If once he had had a heart, it was long gone.

  “Just because you cannot help but preach the merits of a happy alliance, Dexter-” he began.

  “Gentlemen,” Nat intervened, “we are here to discuss what we are to do about Tom Fortune’s escape from Newcastle jail, not to argue the toss about the benefits of marriage. We need to recapture Fortune as quickly as possible, and since you were both instrumental in arresting him in the first place, we also need to consider the possibility that he may bear a grudge against you and come seeking revenge.”

  “Thank you for the warning, Nathaniel,” Miles said, downing a glass of brandy and savoring the taste. “I imagine there are any number of men who would not mourn if something terminal happened to me.”

  “Cuckolded husbands,” Dexter murmured, “outraged fathers. Does not your inheritance of the Marquisate of Drum bring with it a family curse, Miles? I seem to remember hearing some stories. This could be the moment it carries you off-”

  “I don’t believe in family curses,” Miles said.

  “Your mother does,” Nat pointed out. “I remember thinking it most unusual for a bishop’s wife to be so superstitious. I am surprised that she has not yet arrived in Yorkshire to warn you of the dangers of the Curse of Drum.”

  “God forbid,” Miles said. He had been virtually estranged from his family since he had left eleven years before, and he had no intention of letting his mother interfere in his life now. “She is safely in Kent,” he added. “I doubt she will ever venture this far north. She considers Yorkshire to be a foreign country.”

  “Strange about the Curse of Drum, though,” Dexter said. “So many of the previous marquises died young and in horrible circumstances.”

  “Coincidence,” Miles said shortly.

  “The twelfth marquis was struck down by the sweating sickness,” Nat mused.

  “There was a lot of it about that year.”

  “The thirteenth marquis was run over by a carriage…” Dexter murmured.

  “He was always very careless when crossing the street,” Miles countered.

  “And your predecessor, Freddie, burned to death in that brothel.”

  “Freddie was such a roué that he was destined to die in bed one way or another,” Miles snapped. He had no time for superstition, but a rehearsal of the deaths of all sixteen previous marquises of Drum was not a happy event. “Can we please get back to business?”

  “Very well.” Dexter settled back in his chair and accepted the change of subject Miles so clearly wanted. “Extraordinary that we all thought it was Warren Sampson who pulled the strings around here when all indications now seem to point to the fact that it was Tom Fortune who was the master criminal. And now that Fortune is free, it will be the devil of a job to capture him again.”

  “He bribed the prison guard, I suppose?” Miles said. When he and Dexter had arrested Tom Fortune for murder the previous autumn it had been on the grounds that he had killed Warren Sampson, a local industrialist with a very murky reputation whom the Home Secretary had suspected of being involved in all sorts of criminal dealings. Further investigation had suggested, however, that it was Tom Fortune who had been the leader of Sampson’s men, and that he had used Sampson as a decoy.

  “Either bribed him or threatened him,” Nat agreed. “And since then there has been no word of him. He has gone to ground.”

  “He will be biding his time,” Miles said. “Is there anyone who might have heard from him?”

  “Sir Montague certainly wouldn’t give his brother the time of day,” Dexter said, “so I doubt Tom will have looked to him for help.” He looked at Nat. “I doubt that Lady Elizabeth would have any sympathy for him, either-not after his treatment of her friend Miss Cole.”

  “Certainly not,” Nat agreed.

  “Miss Cole…” Miles said thoughtfully. “Since Tom Fortune seduced her and she carries his child, he might try to get in touch with her. Where is she now?”

  A frown settled on Dexter’s brow. “The Duke and Duchess of Cole threw her from the house when it became apparent that she was increasing. They wanted her to go abroad and have the child in secret but Lydia refused. There was the most appalling scandal. You missed most of this, Miles, being in London, but it was the on dit of Fortune’s Folly all winter.”

  Miles grimaced. He could well imagine the outrage and horror with which the ghastly Duchess of Cole would have greeted the news of her daughter’s disgrace. There would have been no kindness or sympathy for Lydia at Cole Court. Her fall from virtue would have been roundly condemned.

  “Laura offered her a home with us,” Dexter continued, “but she has found her own pregnancy difficult this time, and Lydia did not wish to be an added burden, nor to add to our financial problems.”

  He looked at Nat. “I believe that Lady Elizabeth also offered Miss Cole a home at Fortune Hall, did she not?”

  “She did,” Nat confirmed, “but Sir Monty refused to countenance it. He said that since Miss Cole had not seen fit to give herself and her dowry in respectable wedlock, she must live with the consequences of her immoral actions.”

  “Monty is a narrow-minded fool,” Miles said dispassionately. “It was his brother who seduced an innocent girl in the first place.”

  “True,” Nat said, “but there are always plenty of hypocrites in situations like this.”

  “Poor girl,” Dexter said. “It is hardly as though she flaunts herself! No one has seen or heard a word from her since she went to stay with Miss Lister.”

  “Miss Lister?” Miles said, startled. He put his glass down with a jerk. “Lydia Cole is staying with Alice Lister?”

  “Both Miss Cole and Lady Elizabeth are staying with Miss Lister at Spring House,” Nat said. “Monty is up in London at present, so Mrs. Lister chaperones both the girls around.”

  “It was brave of Miss Lister to give Miss Cole shelter when there are people who already cut her dead because of her own background,” Miles said. He had noticed the previous autumn the way in which snobs like Faye Cole had drawn aside to avoid speaking to Alice because of her humble origins. No doubt her daily life was full of these little pinpricks of spite and disapproval. “We should speak to Miss Cole,” he added. “She may be the only one who can lead us to Tom Fortune.”

  Nat shook his head. “I doubt she would agree to see any of us. She refuses all company.”

  “Then we need to speak with Miss Lister instead,” Miles said. “Apart from anything else, Miss Cole might be in danger.”

  Dexter gave him a searching look. “Does that trouble you, Miles?” he said dryly. “You are not known for your sympathetic qualities.”

  “No, it doesn’t trouble me personally,” Miles said, “but it is likely to be influential in persuading Miss Lister to convince her friend to speak with us. If we impress upon her that Tom might be a threat to Lydia-”

  “We can frighten both girls and use them to get to Tom Fortune,” Nat finished. “Nice work, Miles.”

  “We cannot afford to be scrupulous,” Miles pointed out.

  “Miles is right,” Dexter said, “much as I deplore his methods, he is, as usual, correct.”

  “
Thank you, Dexter,” Miles said acerbically. “Nat, will you prepare the ground with Lady Elizabeth? I will speak to Miss Lister. I think we need to make a few discreet enquiries first before we tell them that Fortune has escaped.”

  “Agreed,” Nat said. “The perfect opportunity for you, Miles.”

  Miles raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Construe?”

  “To renew your attentions to Miss Lister,” Nat said, with a mocking smile. “Now that you are so utterly sunk in debt, you will be needing a rich heiress more than ever.”

  “That,” Miles said, “is exactly what I thought, too.”

  Dexter almost choked on his brandy. “I’m sorry,” he said, when he had recovered his breath, “but which part of Miss Lister’s scathing rejection of your suit did you not understand, Miles?”

  Miles shrugged. “It is unfortunate that I was obliged to abandon my previous pursuit of Miss Lister-”

  “Unfortunate?” Dexter’s brows almost disappeared into his fair hair. “You dropped her for a richer heiress!”

  “And even more inopportune that my courtship of Miss Bell did not come to fruition-”

  “She threw you over for an earl.”

  “And likewise extremely annoying that Sir Montague chose to tell Miss Lister of my ill-advised wager on her virtue,” Miles continued smoothly, “but I am certain that I can persuade her to accept me all the same.”

  “If I were a betting man,” Nat said, lips twitching, “which I am not, as I have seen the predicament it has got you into, Miles, I would make a wager that you have not a hope in hell of pulling this off. Miss Lister is no fool and she knows now that she cannot trust you an inch.”

  Miles shrugged again. He drained his glass and picked up the wedding dress. It felt cool and silky soft against his fingers. The perfume of honey and roses seemed to cling to it, reminding him of Alice and the softness of her hair against his fingers and the scent of her skin. It raised an echo of primitive arousal in him. He wanted Alice Lister. It was a simple matter of physical attraction. And he wanted her money. That was a simple matter of economics.